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Re:Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on... by kadoban on Tuesday August 30, 2022 @10:00PM (#32657491)
> I looked back into the science-fiction literature to try to find the earliest example of a story featuring a nonhuman industrial civilization on Earth. The earliest I could find was in a Doctor Who episode.“

> That 1970 episode of the classic TV series involves the present-day discovery of “Silurians” [...]

That can't possibly be the first example of that concept in sci-fi, can it? Nothing against Doctor Who, just seems unlikely. Trying to think through the early sci-fi I've heard of or read though and I'm not coming up with anything with that concept.

Re:Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on... by formerkrogemp on Tuesday August 30, 2022 @10:12PM (#32657555)
HG Wells Time Machine might qualify, but it imagined humanoid life following humanity's inevitable decline in the far flung future. I don't suppose that imagining this backwards instead of forwards in time would have been too much of a stretch. The heavy influence of Abrahamic religions up to the time might have influenced early scifi writers to treat the far flung "future" as a safer topic for allegory, metaphor, or thought experiment than the religiously more significant past I guess, especially with the relatively rapid rate of invention and change represented by industrialization.

I've always wondered where the phrase 'silurian hypothesis' came from. I never imagined it came from an ancient doctor who episode.

Re:Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on... by binibus on Wednesday August 31, 2022 @03:36AM (#32659425)
Maybe some Lovecraft's tales (?). There are several advanced civilizations predating humans, but I can't pin down if some evolved strictly on earth.